North Korea, facing international sanction for its nuclear test this week, has restarted a plant that makes bomb-grade plutonium, a South Korean newspaper reported on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
Pyongyang also appeared to have fired off a third short-range missile late on Tuesday after it added to tensions with a launch of two others earlier in the day, the South's Yonhap news agency quoted a unnamed government source as saying.
U.S. President Barack Obama is working to form a united response to Monday's nuclear test, widely denounced as a grave threat to stability that violates U.N. resolutions and brings the reclusive North closer to having a reliable nuclear bomb.
The secretive state also appears to have made good on a threat issued in April of restarting a facility at its Yongbyon nuclear plant that extracts weapons-grade plutonium.
The Soviet-era Yongyon plant was being taken apart under a six-country disarmament-for-aid deal and there were no signs yet that the North, which conducted its only prior nuclear test in October 2006, was again separating plutonium.
"There are various indications that reprocessing facilities in Yongbyon resumed operation have been detected by U.S. surveillance satellite, and these including steam coming out of the facility," the country's largest newspaper Chosun Ilbo quoted a separate unnamed government source as saying.
Analysts say Pyongyang's military grandstanding was partly aimed at tightening leader Kim Jong-il's grip on power so he can better engineer his succession and divert attention from the country's weak economy, which has fallen into near ruin since he took over in 1994.
Many speculate Kim's suspected stroke in August raised concerns about succession and he wants his third son to be the next leader of Asia's only communist dynasty .
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